Old house closets

Our house is a pretty typical "old house" setup, with one fairly shallow closet in each bedroom. This is okay for the kids' rooms but is tough in ours, with both of us needing closet space. We have a crappy wardrobe for my husband's suits but would like to find a better alternative.

Just wondering what other people have done to work with storage issues for clothing. Do you have a piece of furniture you like? Or some other solution?

Well before we owned the house, they built in larger closets on one end of the room on either side of a window and put a window seat between them.

I would love something like that - but we have a radiator under the one window that would make sense, and heat pipes running alongside it...

We converted the his and hers closets to a single large closet in the bedroom. And turned a small room into my "dressing room" which I love, love, love, but I realize that is not feasible for everyone. If you have a large master bedroom adding a larger closet with wardrobes could be an option. Check out the Ikea ones. They are not very expensive and if you do end up liking them, you can turn them into built-ins rather easily. Check out this couple's blog about how they did just that. The finished product looks amazing and totally part of the room, but yes you need a fairly large room for this.
http://megandmartinmen.blogspot.com/2013/01/ikea-pax-wardrobe-hack.html

Tarheels, when we were rebuilding our house we got some serious help from @shh. She can vouch for the fact that we also had 3 of those comically small closets out of the 6 she made over for us. Hit her up. It was worth it for us. Also, she was verrrry patient with me...

We bought some decent-size dressers on Craigslist, to start with. Our closets already had shelving in them, but we used easyclosets.com to fit our kids' and hall closets with shelves, drawers (in the one case where the closet was deep enough), and rods. It made a huge difference, but maybe not as much as you might need.

i rotate my wardrobe by the season and when rotating purge stuff that i dont like/feel good in to deal with smaller closets, also a huge fan of under the bed storage and floor to ceiling built in closets/shelving

seems these days most of my clothes are foldable vs hanging which also reduces needed space

converted portion of attic into walk in closet.

There is a radiator under the window seat! They just put the mesh screen that is used on the front of radiator covers in the front, so there's no storage underneath. There's a cleat holding the seat against the wall and several vertical supports in the front. It's like a large radiator cover that you can sit on. (we had a cushion made for the space).

srg36 said:

There is a radiator under the window seat! They just put the mesh screen that is used on the front of radiator covers in the front, so there's no storage underneath. There's a cleat holding the seat against the wall and several vertical supports in the front. It's like a large radiator cover that you can sit on. (we had a cushion made for the space).

Hmm.... very interesting. I wonder if the heating pipes could be hidden in a closet (or they could build around them).

You can build in a closet floor that is above the pipes with meshwork to allow heat to radiate out from under the closet, if I'm understanding your set-up correctly. I've seen this done with cabinetry in kitchens and heating pipes.

@bikefixed, thanks for the referral. I did already meet with tarheelsinnj for a free consult (via my closet company) but with her situation, the built ins (her closet itself can certainly be improved but it's small) were cost prohibitive, as sometimes happens when you add decorative doors and such to work in a Victorian home. The doors, decorative moldings, drawers are really what drives up the price.

I've had my system cut around baseboard heat and pipes.

(FWIW, I don't really work for the company anymore for several reasons, but i do still work up closet/mud room/etc designs for clients as an independent consultant.)

Yes, and just to be clear - the ideas @shh had were gorgeous!!! If we had the budget we would definitely consider her plan. The wall we were talking about was very long so to do a full wall of built-ins was indeed cost-prohibitive and probably more storage than we need (ha, is there such a thing?). But I figure we can't be the only people who have found creative work-arounds.

TarheelsInNj said:

srg36 said:

There is a radiator under the window seat! They just put the mesh screen that is used on the front of radiator covers in the front, so there's no storage underneath. There's a cleat holding the seat against the wall and several vertical supports in the front. It's like a large radiator cover that you can sit on. (we had a cushion made for the space).

Hmm.... very interesting. I wonder if the heating pipes could be hidden in a closet (or they could build around them).

Do they come out of the floor or wall and then travel over to the radiator?

At some point prior owners in our home built a couple of closets around the front hall radiator. The steam pipe comes up through the floor in the closet and that's where the shutoff valve is. Then the pipe goes to the radiator about 8 inches off the floor.

So imagine this: it's cold outside, the steam heat is on, and there is a short length of toasty pipe in the closet where you store your coats.

So you could have a personal clothing heater in your closet.

I love the idea of a heated closet. In our West Orange house, the walk-in closet in the master bedroom was one of the coldest spaces I've ever encountered. I wanted to put on a parka just to decide what to wear on the average day.

We recently moved to town and got Elfa closet systems installed from the Container Store. I was actually shocked at how much more usable they made our typical "old shallow closets". You can enter the closet's measurements and "build it" and order yourself online, or work with an agent over the phone or in a store. We did the former and it at worked out really well. http://www.containerstore.com/elfa/index.htm

We built a two cedar closets in the attic, my primary and my wife's other seasons'. Not perfect solution by any means, but workable.

Our issue is not so much in off-season clothes storage, but the every day. My husband has to wear suits to work so he has a lot of hang-up things.

This is what I mean by the pipes. Aren't they lovely?

pmartinezv said:

We converted the his and hers closets to a single large closet in the bedroom. And turned a small room into my "dressing room" which I love, love, love, but I realize that is not feasible for everyone. If you have a large master bedroom adding a larger closet with wardrobes could be an option. Check out the Ikea ones. They are not very expensive and if you do end up liking them, you can turn them into built-ins rather easily. Check out this couple's blog about how they did just that. The finished product looks amazing and totally part of the room, but yes you need a fairly large room for this.
http://megandmartinmen.blogspot.com/2013/01/ikea-pax-wardrobe-hack.html

The wardrobe at that link is AMAAAZING!! I seriously want to do something like this in our bedroom and we don't even really need the extra space. If you have the space in your bedroom, it's definitely something to consider. This is an interesting link, too: http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/ikea-hacks-10-diy-ways-to-make-cheap-wardrobes-look-more-expensive-202389

I'm sure there's a clever way to work around the pipes with some molding or framing them out....

In the meantime, can you hang a second bar halfway down your closet for shirts and such? We put a lower bar in the girls' closets so J can get to her clothes and it adds so much more space. Her shirts are tiny, but I'm seriously considering doing it in ours too, just for the space.

shh said:

@bikefixed, thanks for the referral. I did already meet with tarheelsinnj for a free consult (via my closet company) but with her situation, the built ins (her closet itself can certainly be improved but it's small) were cost prohibitive, as sometimes happens when you add decorative doors and such to work in a Victorian home. The doors, decorative moldings, drawers are really what drives up the price.

I'm intrigued by your closet company. We have his/her side by side closets, that I dream about making into one large closet, even stealing space from the room.

Do you have a website?

@grahamb, I'll PM you.

We've redone 3 closets with the Elfa stuff from Container Store. You can really maximize space if designed well.

There's no way we can share our single closet, unfortunately. Mine does need to be organized better (it's a nightmare!!) but we still need some kind of other thing for him. I like all of these suggestions!! Definitely gets the wheels turning.

I moved from a house with a giant master bedroom with enormous closets full of clothes I seldom wore to a petite house with almost no storage space. I've taken over space in unused rooms (including under the beds in the guest room) for stuff like coats and sports gear, but I've also gone through a significant downsizing of the wardrobe. There is very little that I need or want to keep from one year to the next, and I finally realized that part of the fun of events is shopping for something new. I've become a fan of Project 333, which I don't adhere to religiously, but it's pretty liberating to not have lots of sad old clothing to haul around. I have a tiny room that I briefly considered turning into a big closet, but the thought of filling it with clothes and having to keep it tidy as a display kind of made me crazy, and I eventually decided to turn the space into a knitting studio with built-in shelves and drawers.

We had the same problem. After hours (days?) spent browsing Pinterest and the like, we designed our own wall of closets and had it build by the carpenters from the painting company we have used (blanking on the name right now). We then filled it with Elfa components. It's no grand walk-in closet, but after 10 years of sharing a closet that also houses the stairs to our attic, it is luxurious to us. You can see photos here:

https://plus.google.com/photos/100643012500818774630/albums/6030377233957115713?authkey=CPTb7Z_VhJiJXA

Frances, love it, it is creating the thought for me to have someone come in and see if any ability to merge two separate closets into one continuous closest, and possibly build it out a little if needed. This might be a solution for closet space creation for the other 2 rooms as well. Has anyone ever just widen/lengthen the opening of their closets to get full access - how much that might cost? @grahamb sounds similar to what you are looking at doing, please share anything you learn

My brother is a woodworker and built a large armoire for my husband. It has hanging space on top and large shelves on the bottom. we put wicker baskets on the shelves and he uses them like a dresser. Brother originally built it in two pieces and then we discovered the large "closet" top piece wouldn't fit up our stairs, so he turned it in to two pieces. So, its not a 3 piece armoire that is much easier to move. Someday I dream of building a masterbath above our sunroom "maplewood" room and putting a large closet in along with that. I have a tiny closet and lost space in it for the air conditioning duct when we put in central air.

@frances I love that!! Thanks for sharing. Great solution!

truegrid said:

. Has anyone ever just widen/lengthen the opening of their closets to get full access - how much that might cost?

My parents did this in the house where I grew up and it made a huge difference in the accessibility of the closets. I'm contemplating doing this in our daughters' rooms, but then we'd lose the wall space that is at a premium there. We've already smushed the beds into the smallest corners available! But if you have the wall space to give up for the extra door space, I think it'd be totally worth it and probably cheaper than a lot of other options.

Eta: My parents replaced the single door with sliding mirror doors. It was awesome in the 90's but I don't know what I would use if we widened the closet openings in our house.